Cash Or Condition ? Evidence From A Randomized Cash Transfer Program

Sarah Baird · Craig McIntosh · Berk Özler

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Poverty, Education, and Child Welfare School Choice and Performance Gender, Labor, and Family Dynamics

Abstract

Conditional Cash Transfer programs are "...the world's favorite new anti-poverty device," (The Economist, July 29 2010) yet little is known about the specific role of the conditions in driving their success. In this paper, we evaluate a unique cash transfer experiment targeted at adolescent girls in Malawi that featured both a conditional (CCT) and an unconditional (UCT) treatment arm. We find that while there was a modest improvement in school enrollment in the UCT arm in comparison to the control group, this increase is only 43 percent as large as the CCT arm. The CCT arm also outperformed the UCT arm in tests of English reading comprehension. The schooling condition, however, proved costly for important non-schooling outcomes: teenage pregnancy and marriage rates were substantially higher in the CCT than the UCT arm. Our findings suggest that a CCT program for early adolescents that transitions into a UCT for older teenagers would minimize this trade-off by improving schooling outcomes while avoiding the adverse impacts of conditionality on teenage pregnancy and marriage.

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References

2003Grandmothers and Granddaughters: Old-Age Pensions and Intrahousehold Allocation in South Africa 2012Do better schools lead to more growth? Cognitive skills, economic outcomes, and causation 2004School subsidies for the poor: evaluating the Mexican Progresa poverty program 2009Conditional Cash Transfers : Reducing Present and Future Poverty 2007Fertility, Female Labor Force Participation, and the Demographic Dividend 2008Early Marriage, Age of Menarche, and Female Schooling Attainment in Bangladesh 2006Assessing the Impact of a School Subsidy Program in Mexico: Using a Social Experiment to Validate a Dynamic Behavioral Model of Child Schooling and Fertility 2003Early female marriage in the developing world

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